Functional Objectives and Meaningful Activities

Functional objectives are essential to ensure that the skills being taught are useful and meaningful to the child. Any skill which increases the child's independence can be considered functional. For example, learning one's name and address or how to wash one's hands are useful skills, whereas sorting items by color over and over again or writing vertical lines over and over many not be useful to a child. Along with being functional, activities designed for instruction should also be meaningful to the child. For instance, learning to write a variety of letters may not be as meaningful to a child as learning how to write the letters in his own name.